He laughed as he looked at her.

“Come, you must be hungry.  Take your soup while it’s hot; don’t waste your time looking at me.”

“Sahib, I cannot help looking at you.  You are so wonderful to me!  Please give me leave to.  I do not want any soup.”

Hamilton, who by this time had finished his own, leant back in his chair and laughed again, looking at her with eyes blazing with mirth and passion.  This innocent, genuine admiration was very pleasing to him in its flattery; this worship offered to himself, rather than his gifts, was something new to him, and the girl’s beauty sent all the fires of life in quick streams through his frame as he looked on it.  He was alive for the first time in his existence, and filled with a surprised happiness as great as the girl’s.  He was as virgin to joy as she was to love.  “You are the dearest little girl I ever knew,” he said; “but if you won’t take soup, you must eat fish.  Yes, I positively refuse you my permission to look at me till you have finished that whole plate.”

Saidie dropped her eyes to her fish very submissively at this, while Hamilton himself filled her glass.

“Have you ever tasted wine?” he asked.  “This is champagne; drink it, and tell me what you think of it.”

“All my people are Mahommedans; we do not drink wine,” Saidie replied, taking up the glass and sipping from it.

“Perhaps you won’t like it,” he suggested, watching her.

“If the Sahib gives it to me I shall like it,” replied Saidie, smiling at him over the delicate golden glass:  it threw its light upwards into her great gleaming eyes, and Hamilton kissed the little hand that put the glass gently down on the table again.

Next after the fish came game and joints, course after course, more food in that one meal than Saidie was accustomed to see for many people for a week.  Her own appetite was soon satisfied, and she sat for the most part gazing at Hamilton, with her hands tightly locked together in her lap:  such a nervous delight filled her, such a strange joy in knowing herself to be alive, to be possessed of a beautiful body that by reason of its beauty was worthy the caresses of a man like this; such a pure rapture animated every fibre, to realise that it was in her power to give pleasure to him.  With such feelings as these no faintest hint of humiliation or degradation could mingle.  Saidie felt only that superb and joyous pride that Nature originally intended the female to have in her surrender to the male.

Her very breath seemed to flutter softly with joyous trepidation and excitement as it passed over her lips.  That she was to be his, held in his arms, admitted to his embrace, seemed to her to be the crown of her life, an honour given by special divine favour.

So must Rhea Sylvia have felt praying before her Vestal altar when Mars first appeared to her startled eyes.

And Hamilton, with his keen, sensitive temperament, saw into her mind clearly, and was fully aware of all this fervent adoration, this intense passionate worship springing within her; and an immense tenderness and reverence grew up within him, enclosing all his passion as the crystal vessel encloses the crimson wine.